Setting Up Rate Plans

Your company’s pricing manager creates a rate plan as a new customizable product and associates a class with it that defines its attributes. For this customizable product, she wants Payment Type to be the attribute of the parent rate plan so that the attribute is inherited by its subcomponents. She then creates another product as a subcomponent to represent the different usage types and associates it with the same class.

Next, the pricing manager sets up tier pricing for the class, specifying different tiered rates for different attribute combinations. She sets up a price list for her company and for each of the competitors. She adds both the root product and subcomponents as price list items. She associates the tier pricing with the subcomponents.

A month later, the pricing manager receives the latest publication of residential rates for a major competitor, so she updates her data with the most current information for each rate for that competitor.

Next, she realizes that the competitor has introduced a new rate plan into the market. Because her company does not have an equivalent rate, she creates a new rate product for the competitor’s plan and adds it to the competitor's price list.

She can then also model the relevant pricing structure. When a customer service representative or a prospective customer chooses this rate, the comparison reports that there is no equivalent or like-for-like rate plans and returns only those rate plans that match the attributes of the competitor's product or service.

The next rate on her market intelligence gathering list is from a new competitor and therefore not in the database. She sets up a new price list for that competitor, and adds the existing equivalent rate products. She also notes that the rate is offered only within the city limits of Richardson, so she creates a rate structure for which the Region attribute has a value of Richardson.